Coffee
by planet p
Summary: Jarod is not the only one leaving surprises.


**Coffee** by planet p

**Disclaimer** I don't own _the Pretender_ or any of its characters.

* * *

_2009_

The baby was healthy and happy, and hers, except that Miss Parker hadn't birthed him. She hadn't even known that she was a mother, or how it was possible that she was.

Brown had told her that he'd not been able to locate the surrogate mother, nor who'd authorised the release of her genetic samples, though he'd been able to tell her that she'd had her ova harvested when she'd been seventeen. She hadn't even known it at the time, and here was Brown just admitting it freely, as though it meant nothing, when she'd learnt that the baby was hers.

The baby had been left by the surrogate mother at a hospital that Jarod had been working at for a Pretend, with a note addressed to Jarod. Perhaps this wouldn't have been so unusual if the baby hadn't been left at the hospital three days before Jarod had even decided to investigate a negligent death at the hospital by posing as a doctor.

When he'd told Miss Parker of the baby, after considering a billion different options, he'd left out this minute detail. It wasn't that he didn't believe in psychics or seers, but he didn't want the Center going after the surrogate mother, if she'd been the one who'd seemingly predicted where he'd be thirty-six hours later, or to coerce her into confessing who had.

He just hoped that Miss Parker did not come by this fact of her own means, or by word of Catherine's Voice.

He wondered himself. Why him? Why had the Center created a baby for Miss Parker? Why now? What did they want the baby for? What were they planning on using the baby for? All of these questions, and more, had plagued him from the moment he had decided to bring Miss Parker into the loop.

Margaret and Ethan had told him that it was the right thing to do, which seemed, to him, unlikely, given their individual histories with the Center, and his father, Major Charles, had been strongly against the idea.

Emily, and Mo, his clone, and fellow Center subject, had been undecided, and Zoe had told him that the baby absolutely had to be returned to its mother – its _real_ mother.

Harmony, his mother, Margaret's long time friend and novelist, had thought that they should find the baby a good home, away from the Center. If Miss Parker was half of what he'd been lead to believe, she would know what had happened, and that they'd made the best choice, and leave it at that, and the Center would never interfere with the life of her baby.

Jarod spent countless hours running countless Sims, and countless more hours in thought. He'd really have valued Kyle's input in such an important decision, he'd remembered thinking, but Kyle was no longer with them, and Ethan had never mentioned hearing his Voice, and Jarod did not feel like pushing him to use something that had screwed him up his whole life.

He supposed, maybe, he just wanted Kyle to be allowed to have his peace, also, for what it was worth, and a baby – even Miss Parker's baby – was, painfully, not an important or pressing enough matter to disturb that peace.

He could make that decision without the memory of his deceased brother having to be implicated in, what he'd known, could only end in one outcome – the return of the baby to its genetic and rightful mother, and the Hell that she'd had to endure all of her life and had worked for for almost as long, in one way or another, known to her or unknown, from the time she had been a child and nine years old and introduced to an eleven-year-old boy named Jarod.

The baby belonged with its mother, just as Kyle and he had belonged with their mother and father.

From the DNA sample he'd taken, he'd yet to discover the identity of the father, though he was not giving up.

Jarod had stood with Ethan and watched the last mourners depart the grave sight, and known that that was when Miss Parker would find him gone, and the baby waiting in his place.

It was a baby, not a toy, but he'd presented it to her like a gift, like a new toy, and it made him want to cry. To the Center, he'd been a toy. Kyle and Ethan had been toys. Even Miss Parker. And Angelo was now not fit to be anything else.

The Center was Hell, and the letter he'd written, would send the baby straight there. He would have cried, he thought, except that Ethan was with him, and thought that maybe that was why he'd asked him to accompany him, and wanted to cry harder.

And for once, he refrained from ringing Sydney, though it was exactly what he wanted to do.

* * *

Sydney had seen Miss Parker speechless very few times, but when she'd finished reading Jarod's letter, she'd turned to him, wordlessly, and handed him the letter, hands shaking.

He'd been scared then, but he hadn't counted on how scared he would be when Miss Parker confronted Brown in the parking lot with a gun after she'd learnt of what had been taken from her and who'd authorised it. She'd not believed, even after all of the lies, that Mr. Parker could ever do, or have such a thing done to her.

She'd been sedated, but Sydney had managed to convince Brown to be able to have her taken to his office, where he could talk to her in private, and he'd learnt that she was unable to have children. It had been a car accident, when she was twenty-two, and it had taken the life of her best friend with it. In a way, her best friend had become like her child, the child she could not save. She'd aged, she'd gotten older, but, through the years the best friend had stayed the same age, eternally fifteen years old.

At first, she'd told Sydney that she did not want, could not take, the baby, as though it were an expensive gift. The sentiment had upset Sydney, but he'd let Miss Parker talk, and by the end of it, she'd decided that she'd have the baby, and that she'd never let the Center do so.

It was her baby.

* * *

Later, when the baby was declared healthy, and Miss Parker was cleared to stay with him the night in Med Space, Sydney walked to the dining hall for a coffee, glad to finally have a moment of his own, to clear his thoughts, or maybe sort them out.

* * *

_Thanks for reading._


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